You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Among our patients we not infrequently meet women who are tortured by an obsessive fear of killing a child. This idea occurs in men too, but it is probably commoner in women. Some of the women have one or more children of their own; others have none and never had any. Those with children are usually good mothers, genuinely fond of their child. It is therefore all the more terrifying for them to feel a strange impulse, expressed as a wish to harm, to injure or even kill their child. The urge and the fear in these women is not necessarily limited to their own children. The sight of a baby carriage or of children playing in the park can elicit the obsessive fear. Such an obsessive fear is ordinarily but one symptom in a clinical picture, for the women are ridden with other obsessive symptoms.
In this case report of a woman patient, the obsessive thought to kill a child was but one of the many obsessive thoughts which tortured her and which led to a severe narrowing of her participation in normal human activities.
We begin this report with an inquiry into the mechanism of the obsessive fear to kill a child. The reason for this choice is the fact that this symptom is paradigmatic for the underlying mechanism of other obsessive symptoms in the patient. We shall state our thesis directly: the obsessive fear to kill a child is the outcome of